


Evolution

by nosuchanimal



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Dark without being utterly bleak (I think), F/F, Not-super-graphic descriptions of death and violence, Werewolves, Whimsical descent into amorality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 07:34:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13519482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nosuchanimal/pseuds/nosuchanimal
Summary: Buffy finds her in a motel just outside of Phoenix. Faith spends her days riding the motorcycle she stole in Oregon, letting the wind and the roar of the bike drown out Buffy in her head. It works occasionally. Buffy finds her on the night after the full moon, Faith’s last night, when that slow ascent inside her is almost at its peak, when the hair on her arms is standing up and feels too thin, too fine.





	1. Faith

**Author's Note:**

> First time posting here. I've been sitting on this emotional death-trap for a while now, so I decided to take the metaphorical plunge and throw it out into the fic ether. Huge thanks to meetwickedfaith, who provided some much-needed feedback and encouragement. Whoever's still watching this fandom - I'd love to hear what you guys think.

**Faith**  

Faith wakes up to Buffy’s blood in her mouth, to Buffy’s blood on her hands and chin. She hurls a chair through the hotel wall and roars in anger. 

~--~--~ 

**11 months earlier**  

It starts with something small, something so insignificant Faith doesn’t even realize it’s there. It starts with a shallow cut on the back of her shoulder, barely breaking her skin, small pricks of blood welling up and leaving spots on her black shirt that she doesn’t see. It’s healed by the next day. 

It takes Faith 28 days after running Oz down with a tranquilizer gun to realize that something’s wrong. There had been an indefinable feeling before that, a warm restlessness across her skin, something urgent in her stomach that pushed her on patrolling, but she hadn’t thought about it because it felt good. Faith doesn’t question things she can appreciate. It seems presumptuous. 

She wakes up on day 28 completely naked, curled up on the side of the road two miles outside of Sunnydale. She opens her eyes, slowly takes in the encroaching desert, the tar-black sky slipping into purple, and tries to remember what she drank last night. Fuck, she tries to remember what bar she went to. 

She’s not as scared as another person might be, because Faith’s life has only rarely consulted her on her own preferences, but the conspicuous gap in her mind where last night is supposed to go still unnerves her. There are scratches on her palms and a dark red substance under her fingernails, but she doesn’t look at her hands too closely because some prickling in her gut tells her not to. 

Faith reaches her motel in plaid shorts and a t-shirt proclaiming in loud, blaring letters, “It’s Always Sunny in Sunnydale,” that she got a woman to buy for her at a gas station, and finds her door unlocked and her room trashed. Shreds of her pillow are floating in front of her like dust, winking at her in the morning light. She stands in her doorway, sees her bed flung against the farthest wall, and doesn’t understand anything. 

Faith’s in the process of brushing her teeth when she picks something out of her canine, a thin, hard sliver of jagged white. She turns it slowly between her thumb and forefinger, silhouetted against the fluorescent glare of the bathroom lights, brow furrowed and searching. Her stomach reaches full comprehension before her mind does, and she barely makes it to the toilet in time to throw up when she realizes it’s a piece of bone. She _knows_ , with the type of spontaneous certainty that erupts when something terrible has happened, that it’s human. 

There’s something heavy and tense around her chest for the rest of the day, something that makes her skin crawl and the tips of her fingers buzz. She can feel a force twisting inside of her now, sinuous and incessant, giving off heat like a low fire smolders. She touches her chest periodically throughout the day, almost involuntarily, because it feels like she’s restraining something. 

Giles holds up the newspaper somberly when she’s in the library, pale and slouching in her chair and avoiding eye contact. He points at the headline, “Mangled Body Found on Highway 680 – Police Suspect Cougar,” and the air contracts as everyone tries not to look at Oz. Faith swallows the bile rising in her throat and expects them to look at her. 

No, Giles says. Not Oz. He was locked up. It was some other creature, maybe another werewolf. 

Willow gives Oz a loving smile and everyone relaxes. 

I’ll find it soon enough, Buffy says, frowning. Faith listens in silence. Fuck me, she thinks, and presses a palm to her chest again. 

~--~--~ 

**9 months earlier**

Faith wakes up, two months after that first morning, with a dead body next to her. She’s in a clearing in the woods this time, blades of grass tickling her into consciousness. She shivers at the cool air, a wave of prickles breaking across her bare skin. The first thing she notices is the dried blood on her hands and around her mouth, and the second is the corpse next to her. It’s a girl, young, brown hair, pretty except for the gashes covering her face and gaping wounds on her stomach. Faith stares at her for three hours, studying her with a detached calculation until “she” becomes an “it,” until the body is just a body and she doesn’t feel nauseous or guilty. 

Something inside of her had rebelled so strongly against the idea of constraints that she barely considered it. Faith went back to the library one weekend after day 28, stood in front of the cage, and shuddered. She wasn’t going to be meshed in, hemmed in, forcibly restrained by metal bars and cold tile. She wasn’t going to be the poster girl for the human obsession with restraint. She wasn’t sure whether it was the wolf or Slayer or even the girl inside her that refused so unequivocally, but, really, it didn’t matter. Now, waking up with this person, cold and inert, next to her, she understands that freedom is the natural state, is what she’s supposed to be. 

Faith walks back to her motel, slinking through the trees and avoiding the pine cones on her bare feet. It’s a matter of numbers, she thinks. I’ve saved way more people than I’ll ever hurt. And it’s not like I had any control. It’s not like I was planning on killing someone. She’s dead because she couldn’t protect herself. Survival of the fucking fittest, yeah? 

Faith walks taller, holds her chin higher, and feels a strange sense of satisfaction. Yeah, she thinks. Survival of the goddamn fittest. 

Buffy says something about the Chosen Two later that afternoon, jokingly with a tinge of contempt that creeps into her voice, and Faith stares at her. That’s not right, she thinks. She sits with a soft quivering excitement from her kill last night, a slow rush from her accomplishment and the fact that no one knows _shit_ about what she is three nights a month, and lets Buffy’s words sift through her mind. 

She’s not a Slayer anymore, not a pure Slayer. She’s different now. Faith sees that barely suppressed self-righteousness in Buffy’s eyes, that feeling of superiority, and thinks, no more of this second-string shit. No more attaching legitimacy where it doesn’t belong. No more pretending that Buffy is the next goddamn messiah. No one can touch her now, not even Buffy _fucking_ Summers. The flare of vindication inside of her is sublime. 

Faith goes solo for patrol that night, ditches Buffy in Fredericks Cemetery, and doesn’t hold back. Not for one second. She feels invulnerable, free, and she throws herself at the vampires like they can’t touch her. They can’t. Everything is new and bright and untasted, because Faith’s never experienced it like this. They see her, eyes glinting and sharp, teeth bared and lips curled, and don’t how what she is. Faith thinks self-identity isn’t shit next to the sensation of bones breaking under her hands.  

The small prickling of guilt that accompanied every naked morning before then is gone the next full moon. She’s moved on from emotions like that. So, when she flings her ten-inch carving knife at a demon near town three weeks later and runs it through a guy instead, she barely blinks. Rips her knife out, wipes it on his shirt sleeve and thinks, it’s all a numbers game, baby.

~--~--~

**7 months earlier**

Faith doesn’t know when it started, but she realizes that she doesn’t fight like a Slayer any more. She realizes this after she rips a vampire’s finger off with her bare teeth and spits it back on the ground when he’s ashes. Buffy is staring at with her with a strange facial expression, equal parts disgust, fascination, and incredulity. Faith spits again and grins at the other girl, teeth smeared with blood. The fascination part disappears off of Buffy’s face. That’s right, princess, Faith wants to say but doesn’t. _Fuck_ that moral superiority bullshit. 

There aren’t rules to fighting anymore. There’s no etiquette, no boundaries, no innocent bystanders, no guidelines for fighting fair. There’s her and her target and whatever ways she can kill it. And then there’s just her. Faith uses every advantage she has, uses every limb and every weapon she possesses in her fights. She doesn’t move like a human being anymore. 

She doesn’t think like a human being either. Humans like messy ambiguities, idiosyncrasies and gray areas. The world for Faith falls into nice, neat categories based on utility. The wolf inside of her views the world as a toolbox, as everything in it existing for or belonging to her. And now so does Faith. She mentally separates everything she encounters, plops them into “threats,” “assets,” and “useless space.”  Human beings are usually in the third group. Faith reminds herself of this fact every time she wakes up with blood on her hands. 

~--~--~

**2 months earlier**

Faith is in Winston, Oregon, scrutinizing a line of motorcycles outside of a bar for one to steal when she smells her. It hits her sharply, invading her senses so suddenly that it feels like a fist to the stomach. She has to consciously work not to grab the nearest bike and take off, has to shove down those flutters of desperation. It’s the human inside her who’s panicking. It’s the human part giving into that ineffectual pendulum of her own emotions. It’s the human who taints her. 

She left Sunnydale months ago, packed up her three possessions and eight articles of clothing and hopped a bus up north. Buffy and Giles weren’t complete idiots. They had picked up the pattern of murders, noticing the maimed bodies showing up every full moon. And, sometimes, Buffy would give her this look, this penetrating, judgmental-as-fuck look that made Faith recoil. It was getting too dangerous for her to stay. So she left. 

Oregon is as good a place as any. She likes the crispness of the air, likes the bright green mountains that dip and swell like creased fabric. The wolf likes the crush of pine needles under its paws, the animals that taste uncorrupted, unpolluted. Faith steals the money she needs, rents a cheap motel room, and keeps the cemeteries clean. 

She knows Buffy is hunting her. 

~--~--~ 

**1 month earlier**

The wolf is always, _always_ there now, rippling just underneath the surface of Faith’s skin. But on those three days surrounding the full moon, it rises up in her, builds in her so exquisitely, so slowly, that she sometimes has to close her eyes and just feel it. It expands in her veins, running tendrils through her arms, fingers and toes like liquid fire. The evenings on those days is like standing on a precipice, poised at the top of something steep and fucking huge, like hesitating on the top of a rollercoaster, and when the change comes it almost feels like falling. 

She remembers Oz saying that changing was like being overcome by pure, unthinking emotion. It’s not like that with her. Human emotions don’t transfer properly during the change; most of them are obsolete. Anger and love and hate – they get lost in translation. There’s a beautiful freedom in the cold, rational hunt of the wolf, in a world bereft of distractions and superfluity.  

Numbers are important to her now. Numbers and geography and other things that Faith never thought twice about take up space. Charts and graphs are spread out on her bed, crumpled and stained from use, tools to help her track lunar cycles. The number of days before the full moon, the number of hours between sunset and sunrise, the number of miles she wakes up away from her motel, the number of people she’s killed. 

She wears that last category in her head like a title, walks around with it nestled in her stomach. Numbers are important, not because she wants to be organized, precisely, but because she needs to know what she experienced and how long she has to wait. She marks where she wakes up and maps it out in the day, sees how far she had to walk that morning, flitting in and around trees, hiding herself.    

The memory loss is gone. Faith wakes up and remembers everything, every branch whipping past her fur, every tantalizing scent, every taste of prey. It stays with her during the day, slips into her thoughts unexpectedly, intrudes into human activities. Sometimes, in the glaring light of the sun, she has to run a hand up her own arm to check for fur, because it’s getting difficult to separate the states of consciousness. The lines inside her, between wolf and Slayer and girl, intertwine and blur together, so that she can’t say what animal she is any more. Humanity feels more and more like an artificial face.  

Wolf or Slayer or human, though, Faith knows what she is. She is unique. She is unprecedented. She is something brand fucking new, something terrible and beautiful. There’s an intangible division between her and the rest of the world, and she only walks among people because she’s forced to. She is beyond everyone she encounters. 

She’s even beyond the girl who’s hunting her.  

She understands Buffy’s feeling of obligation. Faith is leaving a trail of bodies across the states, and Buffy is pulled towards her with the same sort of magnetism she feels when she’s tracking prey. They both understand the stakes, they both understand the truth of the situation, stripped of pretenses and euphemisms, and either way, it’s leading to the destruction of an individual. 

Yeah, Faith thinks, we’re on the same homicidal page. Except that B’s never seen anything like me. 

~--~--~ 

**Last night**

Faith likes Arizona. She likes the slow crackle of the heat in the atmosphere, the hazy shimmers as it rises off the ground. She likes the hazardous blankness of the desert here, how it feels different, more dangerous than the one in California. She likes the jagged undulations of the mountains, the warm, deep colors of the rock and sand. The wide, open spaces contrast strongly to the congested chaos of Boston, and she likes the illusion of freedom it provides. Smells travel further here. She’s not sure if it’s because of the dryness of the air, or the sparseness of the land and the lack of obstructions, but scents come with every brush of wind. 

She smells her every day. 

She’s taken up permanent residence inside Faith’s head, sits in the back of her mind like an incomplete sentence, an unfinished project. In the past two months especially, it seems like she’s everywhere, inside and outside, invading and enveloping her. Faith inhales and smells her. She goes outside and sees her, flashes of blonde hair, feline grace of movements. She stays inside, nervous and isolated, and thinks about her. Every action is quietly compared to her. She wakes up next to a corpse and thinks, Buffy would probably cry. So Faith laughs. 

She has _never_ wanted to kill something as much as she wants to kill her. She has never wanted to cause the annihilation of an individual as much as she does now. She wants to see her die under her own hands, wants to feel that life slip her away through her fingers. She wants to extinguish that pathetic little flame of _her_ from the world. She wants to prove once and for fucking all that not even Buffy, savior of mankind, can take her.  

She likes to see it as a competition, the way it’s supposed to be between two predators. She doesn’t want to see it as an obsession, because that’s a human fabrication. Faith likes to pretend that she’s beyond human impulses. She likes to pretend that whatever shit she felt for Buffy 11 months ago disappeared with her aversion to murder, that Buffy’s _nothing_ to her, but it rings a little false when Buffy is her standard.     

Buffy finds her in a motel just outside of Phoenix. Faith spends her days riding the motorcycle she stole in Oregon, letting the wind and the roar of the bike drown out Buffy in her head. It works occasionally. Buffy finds her on the night after the full moon, Faith’s last night, when that slow ascent inside her is almost at its peak, when the hair on her arms is standing up and feels too thin, too fine. 

Nice timing, B, Faith says, grinning, heart fluttering in expectation. 

Guess so, Buffy says. Faith looks her in the eyes, cold flint and hazel, and realizes that it was intentional. Buffy can go all out now, doesn’t have to pull back because Faith’s not human. Not for the next eight hours. Faith almost feels respect. 

The fight hits her the second she wakes up the next morning. Licks her lips and tastes Buffy’s blood, sees her hands dark red. Buffy’s still alive. She remembers taking a chunk out of her shoulder, feeling the skin tear off like paper, feeling her teeth scrape bone. For any other human, that would have been a fatal wound. But Buffy’s not any other human. She’s alive. 

Faith destroys her hotel room in anger. She gets on her bike, kicks the stand out, feels it purr and snarl underneath her. Her voice is hoarse from screaming and her stomach is a coiled, painful mess. 

~--~--~ 

**2 months later**  

Faith wakes up uncertain and disoriented now. She wakes up and doesn’t know where she is. She wakes up and needs to run. Faith never liked being in the same place for long, even before Sunnydale, but now it’s not a desire. It’s a compulsion. She wakes up and she’s already twitching. 

She’s in Olympia, Washington now, but she was in Idaho yesterday. Colorado the day before. She’s covered more distance over the past two months than she has her entire life. San Antonio, Texas. Carson City, Nevada. Missoula, Montana. Las Cruces, New Mexico. She flits around incessantly, moves because maybe, godplease _maybe_ there’s a place where Buffy won’t follow her. 

Faith wakes up without that lucidity, that clear self-knowledge she had last year. She doesn’t know what she is now, because she is _not_ unique anymore. She is not brand fucking new. She is not unprecedented. She wakes up one mistake away from livid, because everything she had has been demolished. Because of Buffy. Because Buffy fucks everything up. Because she’s always there to take the position that is owed, fucking _owed_ to Faith and show her how to do it better. Faith is, once again, a copy, a shadow. She feels like she’s going insane. 

Faith can feel her all the time now. She gets these flashes of thoughts and emotions that aren’t her own.  Thinks, I can’t control this, when she’s washing her pants in a motel sink. Feels strange, unfamiliar sensations of guilt and sadness, running across her skin like small insects when she’s reading the newspaper, when those emotions have been absent from her body for a year. She can feel Buffy now, all the goddamn time. 

She knows that Buffy’s in Sunnydale, that she crawled back there after the fight with her tail between her legs, trying to live a pale imitation of her life. Faith knows how futile, how delusional that is. Buffy’s in Sunnydale, but she’s with Faith now too. All the _goddamn_ time.  

Faith gets on her bike and roars across the interstates, moves as fast as she can because there’s no alternative. Slips through cars and tunnels, the wind so harsh it’s almost painful, and Buffy’s still there. Taking up space in her head and chest like another personality, jockeying for position with all the other animals in there. 

The three nights around the full moon are the worst. It’s like the 800-mile distance between them might as well be three inches with how she can hear, feel, smell her. How closing her eyes only makes things worse because she’s imprinted on her eyelids, bright and burning. And it’s on those three nights, when she can practically feel the kind of shit Buffy’s taking, that maintaining that distance is the hardest.  

Because, and this is the part that fucks her over, that doesn’t let her sleep, Faith sometimes doesn’t _want_ to maintain that distance. She feels a force, behind her abdomen, a relentless pull drawing her towards Buffy. Because she doesn’t just want to kill her. Because, sometimes, yeah, it’s a pure, unadulterated hunger to bleed her dry, but other times, that urge tastes sweeter. 

Sometimes, Faith just wants to kiss Buffy. Sometimes, she wants to fuck her, soft and hard at the same time, until they can’t remember their own names. Sometimes, she wants to force-feed her road kill, watch the blood pool in her mouth, watch that sick disgust bloom in her eyes along with the satisfaction. She wants to see her dirty, wants to see her corrupted and fucking filthy, begging for it. And other times, she just wants to _see_ her. 

Faith anticipates the wolf now like a person contemplating suicide anticipates a razor blade. It’s become a refuge. It was a gift before. It’s a necessity now.  

~--~--~ 

**9 months later**

Buffy’s lost weight. She’s all angles now, jagged and shadowed. Sunken eyes and hollowed cheeks. Her eyes are flashing, sharp like a cornered animal. She looks how Faith feels. 

Buffy finds her the second time in a parking lot in Sacramento, a week before the full moon. Faith knew coming back to California was forcing a confrontation, but she’s done playing. She wants it, whatever “it” is, over. She realizes she’s clinging to something precarious and precious, and it’s slithering through her hands like a fraying rope. She realizes that she’s slipping. She realizes this girl, the bloodthirsthatelovelust she feels for her, is her only tether. 

Buffy catches her as Faith’s walking out of a bar, trying to find her bike. She’s stone-cold sober and wishing she’s not. She sees Buffy and stops, has to take several moments to make sure she’s not a hallucination. Faith crushes her keys in one hand, tilts her head and forces a smile. Buffy winces at its effort, at what it reveals, and Faith is furious. What gives you the fucking right, she wants to scream but doesn’t. Instead, she stands motionless as Buffy walks right up to her. She flinches reflexively, braces for the blow, but it doesn’t come. 

Buffy kisses her instead. There’s such a naked desperation in it, such a powerful sense of relief that Faith can’t breathe.    

What else was I supposed to do, Buffy asks, after she’s stepped back and Faith is swaying. There’s a peculiar expression on Buffy’s face, her eyes wet and bright, and Faith is falling. 

They walk in a different world from everyone else. They are something else entirely. The full moon comes, six days later, and they run together and howl exultantly into the night. Faith wakes up, belly full and satisfied, Buffy’s warm, naked body pressed against her, and she’s wet before she’s fully conscious. 

When they’re human, they fuck slower, lingering touches, gasps and pants. When they’re wolves, it’s a chaotic, messy tangle of limbs and growling, of dominance and submission. On nights like that, there’s no black or white, no separation. There’s only red, and they live in the contrast between the bright splashes of blood and the vibrant green of the forest. 

They’re not always together. Faith wakes up one morning and Buffy’s gone, slipping away before the sun rises. She’s not concerned, though, because they both know the foregone conclusion. They’re a seamless entity, even when apart. They are multiplicities, humans and Slayers and wolves and each other, and Faith feels her like she feels her own fingers, as an extension. 

Faith is not unique anymore. But she’s not alone either.


	2. Buffy

**Buffy**

Buffy smells pine before she opens her eyes. The panic takes her by surprise; a swell of hot, bitter terror that arrives before full comprehension. She can barely stand up because her legs are shaking so much. It’s only about twenty feet before she finds him, nettles digging into her bare soles, the sharp metallic smell of blood pulling her along. He’s still wearing hiking boots, but they’re spotted with red and his flannel shirt is shredded. Three fingers on his right hand are missing. 

Buffy throws up for hours and hours, until her stomach feels scraped and raw and she’s just dry heaving, until the tears feel like a permanent fixture on her face. 

~--~--~ 

 **11 months earlier**

There’s something different about Faith. Buffy watches her closely now, because she never did before and a prickling in her stomach tells her that was a mistake. There’s this knowing, veiled half-smile on Faith’s face all the time, unobtrusive enough that it could pass for her typical smirk, but it’s not. It’s disconcerting to Buffy, because nothing good could _ever_ come out of Faith having knowledge other people don’t. 

Faith’s quieter too. Not because she’s calmer or more self-contained, though, but because it seems like she doesn’t think words are worth it anymore. Something’s different. 

It truly hits Buffy when she’s staring at the vampire’s finger Faith just bit off on the ground, small and oddly innocuous-looking on the grass, still seeping blood. She looks back up at Faith and sees her grin, feral and watery with blood, and her stomach contracts.  

Buffy has never understood Faith, not really, because Faith was always that kind of person to cannon-ball into water you couldn’t see the bottom of, but now it feels like there’s an extra layer of insulation between them, an unfamiliar ripple in that line connecting them. She feels almost dangerous. Buffy’s skin moves around her more now, reacts defensively. 

Little jumpy, Faith asks, after she makes a sudden motion and Buffy twitches. Buffy doesn’t answer, just stares hard, because the effortless confidence in Faith’s voice is nothing like the contrived arrogance she usually wears. 

Faith is feeling more and more like a threat. 

Most of the time now, the strange unease Buffy feels around Faith is more offense than anything else. How she feels mocked when she talks about obligations and sacred duty and Faith laughs and rips off index fingers. How it seems like Faith exists to push limits, to put a hand out to Buffy, teeth flashing as if to ask, how far are we gonna go this time? How Faith never takes anything seriously. Unless she does. Which is a thought that scares Buffy too much so she ignores it. 

And really, if she’s being honest, it’s because Faith makes everything look so fucking _easy_ , flitting in and outside of the lines like a child with a crayon. Because Faith’s the kind of girl who comes back home smelling like blood and vampire dust and doesn’t do a fucking thing to hide it. Buffy needs those lines. Needs to partition her life because there should be a division between who she is and what she does. She can almost hear Faith laughing and saying something like, fuck partitions, B. You are what you kill. 

~--~--~ 

 **6 months earlier**

Buffy is talking to a clerk at a Motel 8 in Oregon when she feels her. She’s asking if a girl came through, young, dark hair, maybe a shaggy, vaguely canine look, and she suddenly knows Faith is close. That connection is still there, because even Faith’s wolf can’t suppress something as bone-deep as inheritance. She thinks she can feel it more than Faith, back then and especially now. Because that tenuous thread between them is based on an identity Faith’s long since abandoned. 

Buffy is hunting her. 

There was a window of time, maybe eight hours, where Buffy could’ve let it go. Could have said, it’s not my problem now, when Faith took off without warning four months ago, and let her trail go stale. But Faith made a choice and Buffy did too. Chose to go after her, chose not to ignore that flare in her stomach that she said was obligation but felt more like exhilaration.  

Faith is her responsibility, she thinks. Her duty, her next-in-line, her product, her progression. And now Faith is the glaring exception. The Slayer who skipped out and flaunts the alternative. There’s no one else to go after her. Buffy made a choice, in the first day she started the chase, that she wasn’t going to half-ass this. No wading in tentatively, no dipping toes and fingers. This is immersion, because this is how Faith has lived her entire life. This is how they both want it. 

Buffy is going to find her on one of those nights, when Faith can’t play at something she’s not. They’re going to fight, and it’s going to be messy and bloody and destructive, because Buffy can temporarily take off the pretty wrapping she puts on her life for this. She can accept it for what it is. She’s almost looking forward to it.

~--~--~

 **4 months earlier**

Buffy limps out into the Arizona early morning light. She grips onto the jagged flaps of skin where her shoulder used to be, feels the coarse waves of sand as they come with the wind. The pain is so intense she’s squinting, her jaw as hard and closed as the door she smashed into hours ago. Her head whips around as a scream rents the air. It scares her, because it’s not a scream of fear. It tugs at some deep recess inside of her, bringing up an emotion she can’t identify. She turns back around and drags her feet to the pay phone. 

Giles drives the nine hours to pick her up. She steals gauze and disinfectant from the nearest hospital, sleeps under a highway bridge, and feels her shoulder twist and pound. The second she sees his face she wants to start crying but doesn’t, because there’s a type of concession in that. 

They build a cage in the dank underground of a mausoleum back in Sunnydale, because it seems appropriate and she doesn’t want anyone else to know. She builds it in a strange haze of disconnection, hearing the metal clang through a muffled filter. It’s too difficult to believe that she’s constructing this cage for _herself_. Too difficult to fully accept that Faith _beat_ her, sent her flying across the room missing a shoulder with barely a scratch on her own body.  

That doesn’t matter now, though. Faith is forgotten. One of those horrendous memories that’ll make her cringe when she’s brave enough to think about it, but that’s ultimately unimportant. Buffy has her own life here. She can do this. She can hold onto who she is, who she is meant to be, because the wolf is going to be just another inconvenient complication, another demonstration of her resilience and superiority. And the person who Buffy is doesn’t belong in a fucking cage. 

Faith, _Faith_ used the wolf as an excuse. Discovered something inside herself that justified every immorality, every fault, and didn’t hesitate. Lost herself because it was easier not to resist, because it absolved her of any responsibility. Buffy tells herself this and ignores the small voice in her head saying, Faith will _never_ not be Faith. 

Buffy walks into school and pretends that everything is fine. Pretends that Faith fled the country after receiving a severe ass-kicking. She can’t imagine the faces of her friends if they knew. Disgust? Pity? Or what she fears the most – that they won’t have a reaction. That they’ll look at her with the same steady trust, the same unwavering confidence. They’ll think that this won’t change anything, that Buffy will take it with the same calm conviction she takes everything else and move past it. 

And she can’t explain exactly why this scares her so much, only that it feels uncannily like that dream where she goes to open her locker and realizes she never knew the combination. 

~--~--~

 **3 months earlier**

Buffy wakes up naked for the first time. She wakes up and there’s a glaring void in her memory. She wakes up and looks around in confusion, looks at the blank, dusty walls of the mausoleum and the bars in front of her. She wakes up and there’s this thick, heavy feeling deep in her chest, an undeniable acknowledgment that, yes, it actually happened.  

Part of her had clung to this thin strand of hope that this couldn’t be real, that some power or force wouldn’t let it happen. That she was somehow immune. That she was the Slayer – _the_ Slayer, for fuck’s sake, because Faith sure as shit gave that up and there’s just her now. In this moment, though, that strand breaks, and she has to acknowledge the reality of her own idealistic expectations. There’s nothing but the tedious echo of her own breathing and the feel of cold stone under her bare ass now. There’s nothing but the inevitable recognition. 

There’s this _thing_ inside her now. This wolf that doesn’t give a fuck about the things she holds dear, doesn’t give a fuck about morals and obligations and limits. That, no matter how hard she tries, no matter how tightly she shuts her eyes and pushes it back, she can’t control. It comes and it doesn’t care about some sacred calling bullshit, because everything in Buffy’s previous life suddenly becomes irrelevant. 

For three nights a month, she is _not_ Buffy Summers. She is something wild and violent and uncontrollable and _exactly_ like what she hunts. And with this thing inside her, Buffy feels simultaneously disconnected from it and more connected than she’s ever felt to anything. She would say she liked it if the thought alone didn’t make her want to throw up. 

The next two mornings where she wakes up in the same position feel like some slow collision, like those frame-by-frame videos of car crashes. She can’t remember the night, but she can remember the beginning, the heady invasion as the wolf began to take over. And she can feel it now. _God_ , she can feel it. There, right behind her eyes, quivering in her fingertips like it’s always been there. Maybe it has. 

It’s on the third day, when Buffy is restlessly sleeping in the middle of the day, warm and twisting in her cool sheets, that she shares her first dream with Faith. 

The sun is blindingly white and Buffy can’t look at it. They’re moving, up and down, up and down, caught in an ineluctable cycle. Faith plants her feet on the ground, stopping the see-saw from moving, looks straight up at Buffy and says, it doesn’t have to be like this. Buffy feels a sharp twist of fear in her stomach and shakes her head. 

Don’t do that, she whispers, and her voice is unsteady. Faith holds out her hand and there’s a human heart on it, pulsing and raw. 

Peace offering, she says. Yours, Buffy asks. Does it matter, Faith responds. And Buffy wakes up and realizes she can feel more than the wolf. She can feel her. 

There are disjointed, foreign thoughts and emotions in her after that first morning. Buffy thinks, that little blonde bitch fucks _everything_ up, when she’s eating cereal. Feels a searing rush of anger when she’s in Trig class, and thinks it’s probably from Faith but can’t say for sure. She doesn’t know what’s hers and what’s not. She can’t draw lines anymore. 

Buffy finds herself calling up memories from when Faith didn’t make her skin twitch quite so much, from when there was a certain unembellished comfort in their interactions. Those times when Faith would flash a grin, bare her teeth in challenge after a fight, and Buffy wanted, almost _needed_ to answer it. It was those times, more than any others, where she would feel this creeping suspicion that she and the demons she killed were the same fundamental creature, that they craved the same thing. The only difference, she told herself, was that she didn’t have to. 

Self-control is the most precious commodity in Buffy’s life. 

~--~--~ 

 **Next Day**

Buffy killed a human being. She killed a young boy, maybe 13, 14, who was breathing and happy before she got out of her cage. She ripped him apart with a cold, mechanical efficiency. Her hands, the ones she’s using to grip the straps of her backpack now, tore him open. Buffy can’t stop the recitation of facts in her head, can’t stop the incessant monologue of who, what, how. And when the repetition makes it warped, makes the words lose meaning and context, it makes her do it more. Every second his face isn’t behind her eyelids feels like a tiny crime in itself.  

Funny how she can remember everything now. Funny how that blank hollow in her mind used to infuriate, terrify her, how she used to wish it was filled up. Funny how she almost feels like laughing at the irony. She can remember _everything_. The noises, his body crumbling under her hands, the smell of the forest with sweat and fear. 

She can remember that muted elation she felt after he was dead, the satisfaction. And for a second, just for a _second,_ that soft glow of contentment was still there when she woke up yesterday. It’s the same sensation she feels after dusting a vampire. 

So, this is what it feels like to be a murderer, she thinks. 

And she is, really. She could shrug it off, claim unaccountability because she _knows_ she’s not the kind of person who would ever do that, because she _knows_ Buffy Summers doesn’t have fur and fangs and a yawning gap where her sense of right and wrong is supposed to go. But she can’t. Because she doesn’t know.  

She thought she was indestructible. Thought she could go into their world and come out unscathed, untainted, and she was the only one who _could_ do it. She could decapitate things under the moon and laugh when it was sunny, and _nothing_ could change that because she was fucking untouchable. She was and would always be separate – different from their worlds and able to walk in both. Except now all she feels is tainted. Now there’s only the recognition that there is no separation and maybe, there never was. That the person Buffy thought she was may have never existed in the first place.   

Buffy walks into school and feels like an imposter. She can’t look anyone in the eye. I’m not what you think I am, she wants to yell at them but doesn’t. I’m not what _I_ think I am. She knows she’s moving differently, hunched and listless, but lifting her neck seems like an impossible exertion. She feels like everything is happening at a great distance, like she’s living through the wrong end of a telescope. Or maybe it’s the right end, because who the fuck knows. 

She feels dirty. Funny how her connection with Faith only makes her feel cleaner.

~--~--~ 

 **2 months later**

It was a game. Buffy didn’t understand it, not back then, but Faith did. It was a game because there were stakes and participants and a way to play it. Faith knew how it worked, knew when to cross over, when to reach out and when to pull back. She saw options where Buffy saw inevitability, saw gaps where Buffy saw continuity. _Faith_ understood that the only way to deal with something as serious as life and death was to trivialize it. 

Back then, Buffy thought Faith treated slaying like a game because that was how she treated everything, because manipulation was how she left her mark on the world. She knows differently now. She knows that Faith understood it better than she ever could, because now it feels like she lost something she never even knew existed. 

Buffy can’t eat much. Everything she puts in her mouth turns into raw tendons and muscles, the slippery crunch of bare bones, and she throws it all up eventually. 

Are you sleeping alright, Willow asks, forehead wrinkled and concerned. 

No, Buffy answers. Short and brusque, because words aren’t a form of communication anymore – they’re a distraction. An empty reminder of what she used to think she was.  

Oz approaches her one day, walks up to her and looks into her eyes. How long, he asks. 

Six months, Buffy says. 

It gets easier, he responds, and Buffy wishes he was a little more emotionally candid because it’s hard to tell what he’s really saying. She doesn’t want to talk to him about it, though. The only person she needs to sympathize with her would probably kill her on sight. Kind of defeats the purpose. 

Buffy would say she can’t stop thinking about her, but that’s not entirely right because thought implies a distinct space. She isn’t just in her mind. Buffy would say she never leaves, and that might be more accurate. Faith is _everywhere_. She is the bittersweet taste on the tip of Buffy’s tongue, the bright image floating just outside of her vision. She is what makes Buffy’s throat tighten with an ineffable ache, because Buffy doesn’t know what she wants, only that she _wants_ it. 

She wakes up with the same crippling shame in her stomach every morning, the same weighted guilt, and she embraces it, reaches for it because it’s familiar and lucid. It’s not always there, though. She feels Faith’s emotional purity and is offered a respite from it all, and she takes it eagerly and feels guiltier afterwards. A part of her aches for Faith’s minimalism.    

Buffy fucking _hates_ her sometimes. Some days, the only thing running through her head is, I should have killed her. Sometimes it’s easier to pretend that this is all Faith’s fault, that if it wasn’t for that traitorous _bitch_ none of this would have happened. Sometimes Buffy hates her because Faith never had to go through any of this identity-morality-crisis _shit_ , never had to wash her hands so hard the soap ran red. She could sell out, could become everything she fought against, and still effortlessly be Faith. 

Sometimes the connection sickens Buffy. She wishes she could snap it clean off, but they’re locked in a cycle of birth and death and redefinition. She made Faith and Faith made her and it’s hard to be separate from someone you’re circling. 

Everything is almost too hard right now. Almost too hard to pretend to be who she’s supposed to be, to keep her chin high and hold onto a life that feels sallow and artificial. On some days, it seems like the guilt is there only because she wills it to be, and it tastes worn and manufactured. And she clings to it because it’s her only link to who she was. 

On those days, Faith is a whisper on her tongue and in her ears, the fuckingjustletgo pounding in her temples, and Buffy feels like she’s going insane. Faith is drawing Buffy away from herself, and she _needs_ to follow.  

It’s the hardest during the three nights around the full moon. Buffy had to reinforce her cage last month, because she woke up with three of the bars ripped out and deep gashes covering the walls and metal. She remembers the frantic yearning, the scrabbling for gratification. The wolf knows what it wants. On those three nights, Buffy can’t differentiate between it and Faith, because they both induce the same contradictory blend of emotions. They both offer an escape. 

~--~--~ 

 **5 months later**

There was nothing left to do. There was nothing left to recognize except the irrevocability of it all and the fact that the ground underneath her feet felt more and more like shifting sand. She moved through the days like a shadow, like a stranger. Self-knowledge is a terrible thing to lose, because after it’s gone nothing seems certain, nothing seems solid. Because how can she define the world if she can’t even define _her_?  

Buffy’s standing outside of a bar in Sacramento, keeping her breaths slow and measured. The anticipation inside of her is almost intolerable, skittering across her shoulder blades. She’s closer to her than she’s ever been. Close enough that if she fingers the cold steel of the knife in her jacket pocket, she can almost feel it sliding into Faith’s chest. She can open her mouth and taste the spray of blood in the air. 

Because if there’s one thing Buffy _is_ certain about, it’s that she’s a murderer. It’s that everything she knew disappeared except the belief in her own capabilities. It’s that Buffy’s life for the past nine months has been leading to this inexorable ending. It’s that she has nothing left except the immutability, the finality of this action.   

She left 13 days ago, slipped out of her window at two in the morning with a bag slung over her shoulder and the familiar weight of her favorite knife in her palm. The edges of her life were fraying, unraveling like entrails slipping through fingertips. She had felt Faith coming closer, felt the inevitability of their convergence and couldn’t stop herself this time. 

Her stomach feels hollow now, because she hasn’t eaten in four days and the leaden guilt isn’t there anymore. It was a remnant, some unimportant residue from an identity she’s long since abandoned. She realized it was there only for the sake of being there, like some vestigial organ existing out of habit. The desperate grasping, at guilt, at the past, turned into resignation which turned into certainty. Buffy’s done clutching. She’s moving forward now. 

It’s not revenge. The question of Faith’s responsibility in all of this is irrelevant. It’s not born out of hatred, or bitter resentment, or anything like that. It’s what Buffy reaches when the ground underneath her finally disintegrates. It’s the fact that Faith is all she can feel anyway. It’s the only remaining option. It’s how she’s going to regain some tiny molecule of control back in her life, and it’s as inescapable as the full moon six days away. 

So Buffy waits for her, her attention focused on the expectant shaft of steel in her pocket and the door of the bar. Faith walks out into the parking lot and stops ten feet away from Buffy and stares at her. Faith almost looks the same, except there’s something harder, something sharper about her. She glints like a sliver of cut glass. She looks dangerous. 

Faith narrows her eyes and recoils, almost unconsciously, like she’s not sure if Buffy’s actually there. Buffy feels a grim satisfaction and grips the knife tighter. 

Except then Faith smiles. It’s forced and it looks like a line of barbed wire across her cheeks, ragged and painful. And Buffy flinches and suddenly knows everything. 

She sees all of her. She sees how Faith’s face slips into a mask of pure, bitter fury at her reaction. She sees how they’ve led each other, how they’ve been traveling together to reach the same spot. She sees how close both of them are to crumbling, how they’re both reaching desperately now because the edge is close enough to feel the draft. And she knows that there is _nothing_ final about this moment. 

She walks up to Faith and kisses her, because words have never been important anyway. Faith tastes like acceptance, like salvation, and Buffy’s eyes burn because she has _never_ felt as inchoate as she does now. 

What else was I supposed to do, Buffy asks, and the undeniable truth of that statement breaks in her mouth. The relief is so powerful her knees are weak. Faith is swaying and Buffy is falling. 

They run together under the full moon and Buffy feels freer than she’s ever felt. Because, in a sense, there are no expectations with Faith. There are no obligations and preordained endings. There is only the slick immediacy of the moment, the sweetness of discarding the past and future and the ease of uncertainty. She can, finally, let go. 

She wakes up and her stomach is full of nothing but her prey. She slowly licks the blood off her fingers and smiles, because that is the gift Faith has given her. She can embrace the fact that the idea of self-control she based her life on was a delusion. Some pathetic attempt to instill order and separation where there shouldn’t be. They build a new kind of separation now because they form their own entity.  

Buffy could call what they’re doing reinvention but that feels false. It’s closer to reconstruction. Erecting a being from the ground up. Or maybe it’s from the horizon down, because who the fuck knows. Self-knowledge comes easy now, because she creates it with her.  

They fuck that first morning, bodies entangled when Buffy opens her eyes and feels Faith shudder against her chest, and it’s just a continuation of the night. Follows Faith and slips her fingers in, and the warmth of synchronicity spreads across her like her climax. They fuck like humans and they fuck like wolves, and it all seems to blend and that makes Buffy savor it more. They don’t always stay, though. Buffy leaves one morning and knows they’ll collide in a week or two, because they don’t have to be together to be close. 

Buffy is not superior anymore. But she’s not alone either. 


End file.
